Just as we started the course focusing on alignment and discussing its importance in brand building, the same goes for brand messaging. Once you’ve nailed what messaging should look like for your brand, you can start creating the actual content that gets put into the world.
Please reference our syllabus here. You can find the brand audit template here.
In modules six and seven, we’ll discuss content strategies and techniques that drive quality and consistency throughout your brand experience, but for now, let’s get through some of the basics.
As far as brand progress goes, it should look like this:
Brand alignment > Personality > Voice + Tone > Locking in your visual identity + positioning > messaging framework.
This probably looks familiar as it’s how this course has been structured. Let’s take a closer look and map things out for a better understanding, though, and a bit of a recap:
Define your brand personality
We want to define your brand's personality traits and characteristics clearly. This will help guide the tone, language, and style of your messaging.
Develop brand guidelines
As discussed in module four, a comprehensive set of brand guidelines that outlines the visual elements, voice, tone, and style of your brand provides a reference for consistency in all your communications.
Train your team
You can’t expect people just to know things, and many will never look at your brand guidelines. It’s just a fact. Like all organizational change, education and communication are the keys to success.
You must educate and train your team members on your brand personality and messaging guidelines. This will help them understand how to communicate effectively and consistently with your brand voice.
Regularly review and update brand messaging
Review your messaging regularly to ensure it aligns with your brand personality and resonates with your target audience. Update your messaging as needed to stay relevant and consistent.
Consistent messaging
Ensure your messaging consistently reflects your company's values, mission, and positioning. Align your messaging with your brand personality and maintain a consistent tone and style across all channels. We do this through a few additional resources I’ll get to in a moment.
After these elements are locked in place as a baseline, everything becomes a bit easier because you have established guardrails that span all primary mediums, all content types, and, most importantly, all primary interaction points with your audience.
Now, on to those two additional resources that drive consistent messaging.
Similar to the brand guidelines you create to empower others, there are additional deliverables you can create that make it easier to achieve greater consistency:
Style guide
Voice and tone guide
These can be included in your brand guide or live separately, but you should be covered as long as you have reference material. Unlike your brand guide, these two resources tend to be used frequently, especially if you employ freelance writers and creatives and bring on new employees who create content.
Style Guide
Your style guide is a straightforward document that explains tactically how you and your organization write. It doesn’t have to be something you re-invent; in fact, many brands use AP Style as their foundation and build from there. In cybersecurity, we are plagued by acronyms and technical jargon. This doesn’t always work well if your brand audience includes newcomers and startups. Even if you are targeting enterprise companies, your buyer committee will have different personas within it.
Some inclusions you should detail as a starting point for your style guide are things like:
Guidelines on using acronyms
Rules regarding the use of the Oxford Comma (the answer is always)
Guidelines for capitalization and punctuation
Consistent formatting for headings, subheadings, and bullet points
Preferred writing style (e.g., formal or conversational)
Guidance on inclusive language and avoiding biased language (block list instead of black list or allow list instead of white list).
Instructions on citing sources and referencing external materials
Guidelines for spelling and grammar conventions
Your style guide is a living document, and as you find new topics up for debate, it’s ideal to make an update and provide some context behind why something is listed. Examples of use are also beneficial.
The voice and tone guide is more straightforward; fortunately, we’ve already discussed the tactical elements you would include. This would be a series of sliders or even a table that identifies what emotional responses you want to evoke based on the channel and audiences you are appealing to.
In the video, I highlight my version of a segmented brand personality system.
You’ll notice that this still leaves room for interpretation, but this is by design. We’ll get to this aspect in a future module, but if you remove a writer’s ability to have flexibility in their writing, things tend to move from consistent to boring and flavorless. How you and I see the concept of excitement likely differs. But, with guardrails in place and measuring by order of magnitude, you can keep things on the right track.
Now we’re aligned and understand the balance between creativity and consistency, plus know why things like our style and voice/tone guides are critical resources.
The last item to discuss in this lesson is more of an example.
In branding, you have tag lines and you also have brand elements.
We live in the world of cybersecurity, and to my knowledge, there is no Nike of the cybersec world. That means Palo, Crowdstrike, Zscaler… the biggies that have been around for a bit. You likely can’t think of their tagline off the top of your head. That also assumes they even have an official tagline, too.
This is all to say that yes, you absolutely can develop a brand tagline, but fortunately, unlike Nike, we are in a position where these are more ephemeral and open to change. Instead, what we typically find is that cybersecurity brands tend to offer something like an external brand promise. Still, it tends to be more of a product promise than anything else.
As an example, while I was migrating Drata from WordPress to a headless CMS, we wanted to refine and update some stale brand elements. I certainly wouldn’t call it a brand refresh; it may be an enhancement at best. Anyway, during this process, I went through the brand audit system to identify where we sat compared to competitors, how things mapped up to the product roadmap, and who our audience would encompass over the next two years. The output was a couple of philosophical documents that detail some critical brand messaging. I believe there were three or so, each with a few pages of context, but ultimately, all anyone external saw was maybe a sentence at most. One of the most obvious examples of this was the Trust, Automated. concept. It’s not a tagline… but it might as well be. We slapped it on the homepage, and it took on a life of its own across all other channels and branding. It was never intended to function that way, but I suppose a win is a win.
I say all of this, though, to explain some of the upscaling that happens in messaging and the potential snowball effects.
It was designed to be short, punchy, align with our core values, and touch on one of our main differentiators (automation). By comparison, I could have gone with the standard cybersec primary message and just talked about… next-gen XDR, Zero Trust, AI… the basic overused buzzwords combined with a category or type of technology. Yes, saying what you offer is important, but that doesn’t break you away from any other vendor.
Instead, you should focus on specific outcomes, and I don’t mean statements like: We prevent breaches
We reduce risks
We stop ransomware
and so on and so forth…
Again, it’s important to say what you do and what you offer - ignoring the fact that there are never silver bullet solutions in our industry- but a powerful outcome-based brand statement starts to create stronger connections.
Once you lock in these taglines or brand statements, you also have the perfect foundation for brand awareness campaigns. We’ll talk about themes and campaigns in the next lesson, but if your baseline is: we stop ransomware… there is really not much to go off of there. Focus on the audience, their problems, the company's impact, and how you make their lives better. Invoke emotion. Show you understand what motivates them. Show you understand what keeps them up at night. Show, show, show. Not tell.
Read on to lesson 5.2…
The Battle of Consistency and Creativity